You know us modern time travellers, tourists and vagabonds, always on a lookout for something to tag with the word ‘authentic’ as if this word magically would render any sight we might stumble upon more valuable, more immemorable, more instagrammable.Continue Reading…

My first visit to Porvoo, a historic city some 40 minutes drive from Helsinki, proved to be a very successful trip: red wooden houses aligning a slowly gliding river, cafés and restaurants full of cheery looking customers, tourists groups posing and pointing with their cameras, pretty cobblestoned old town with a cosy feel. What else could a traveller ask for from a coastal Finnish city? Well, in the case of Porvoo, there were also amazing chocolate shops as a bonus.

Which was very convenient as a friend of mine, who likes chocolate and Porvoo, had a birthday coming up. For once, I was going to do well with my gift idea!

Morning has kicked off in the trendy Helsinki district of Kallio but the coffee shop stays quiet even though eight of its dozen or so tables are occupied by eleven o’clock. Van Morrison’s soft voice floats somewhere at the background, and on the walls, Eric Dolphy and Gene Taylor have frozen in a black and white, pixelated pose. Occasionally cups clink against the saucers and the grinder and espresso machine whizzes and hisses.

As we all know, London is a huge, huge city, with a lot of different and unique areas. So how to choose the 10 best cups of coffee I had the pleasure and joy to sip while in London? Why even to try and do it? Surely there would be better things to do on a Thursday evening you might wonder. Yes, surely there is – but I don’t know what.

In market halls, the sense of place is intensified: vegetables, bread, coffee beans, cakes and delicacies, smiles, stares, smell of spice, people strolling around, people separated by counters of fruits; buyers and sellers and loiterers all in one moment of time and space, all in the Market Hall. The time has stopped, this is how the country really is: all that has been built is built on this.